It would be hard to imagine a group of women in science today being called anyone's "harem," but that's the description endured by pioneering astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and her female colleagues at Harvard in 1893.

Leavitt, whose chief discovery allowed astronomers to measure the distance between Earth and other galaxies, is the focus of Lauren Gunderson's new play, "Silent Sky," which opened last week at TheatreWorks.

"The women of today stand on the shoulders of those who have come before," said Jenny Dearborn, chief learning officer at Success Factors, an SAP company, who as a board member of TheatreWorks was so inspired by Leavitt's story that she has put together a networking fundraiser with top-flight Silicon Valley science and tech executives that includes lunch and a private performance of the play.

Seeing the play may hit a nerve for the panelists - or anyone interested in seeing women achieve their potential.

Leavitt, who was born in Massachusetts in 1868, entered what would later become Radcliffe at age 20 and studied topics from classical Greek to differential calculus. At the Harvard College Observatory, she and other highly educated women were relegated to busywork, viewing photographic plates and cataloging the brightness of stars for 25 cents an hour, and were dubbed "Pickering's harem," after the director Edward Pickering, according to the nonprofit American Association of Variable Star Observers website. Her discovery paved the way for other astronomical research including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Pickering published her findings under his own name in 1912, but a fellow scientist tried to correct that wrong by proposing to nominate her for the Nobel Prize in 1926. Unfortunately, the Nobel is not awarded posthumously and Leavitt had died four years earlier of cancer at age 53.

Of all the panelists, Batalha, an astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center, was inspired most by Leavitt. Women have come a long way since Leavitt's day, when they were not allowed to operate telescopes, but Batalha said women are still "severely underrepresented" in physical sciences, making up only about 20 percent of the faculty in astronomy departments nationwide.

The question is why?

"Curiosity," said Batalha, whose team in recent years has announced the discoveries of new planets, "is innate to the human species. Curiosity is blind to gender. Scientific inquiry is the most basic expression of human curiosity. To me that is what science is, yet scientific inquiry has a negative label to many people, men and women alike, maybe because it is perceived as hard or boring."

Batalha entered college as a business major, but disliked economics and switched to astronomy after taking engineering math classes and physics. It was the 1980s, the era of astronaut Sally Ride and the space shuttle.

"I remember the professor talking about pools of oil, an oil slick on the top of a puddle of water taking on its own rainbow hue," she said. "He started writing equations of thin films and refractions. I was blown away that the world could be explained with mathematics - that it's not a chaotic collection of facts, that there is order and meaning behind it. The universe is a puzzle, and we have the ability to unveil the secrets and have a picture emerge."

Bowers, the widow of Bob Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, said she has seen women underestimate or even undercut themselves with words and attitudes for decades. Batalha said many women go into the sciences with an attitude of "no, I can't," while men find the coursework no easier but have "the confidence or naivete to propel themselves forward."

This has never been an issue for Bowers, whose self-assurance was inspired by her father, godfather and her father's best friend. "They took me hunting and fishing and the message was, 'You can do anything you want, if you work at it,' " she said, a message that placed her in good stead as the valley's only top female executive in the 1970s and 1980s, long before Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman and Marissa Mayer became tech CEOs.

"The best thing you can do for anybody," said Bowers, "is present them with as large a banquet of possibilities as you can."

And that is one of the aims of Gunderson, the playwright, who, with Leavitt, wants to expose audiences to something new - the thrill of science, with its dramatic "eureka!" moments. Spirituality, a love story and transcendence round out the tale.

Gunderson's underlying purpose, of course, is to inspire audiences with the story of a woman in science dating back more than 100 years.

"The work they do is the same and the struggles are the same as today, but there was friction for women to be leaders and have their voices heard," she said. "How do we pop that bubble? We tell a damn good story about a woman who changed the world."

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